Web Servers on Justin Carmony

Setting Up Nginx & PHP-FPM on Ubuntu 10.04

Tue, 25 Oct 2011 03:50:59 +0000

This is another wonderful setup that I’ve found myself using rather than the traditional Apache & mod_php setup.

What is Nginx?

Nginx (pronounced engine-x) is a fast, powerful, lightweight web server. I won’t go into the theory under-the-hood, but it’s focus is high concurrency with low memory usage. So while Apache is more robust in supporting many different features, nginx focuses on handling the important features very quickly. I still use Apache internally for our SVN & Trac web server. Heck, even at this time I’m using Apache to host this blog. However, Dating DNA, Clipish, CEVO, Alienware Arena, and some other high traffic sites/apis use nginx.

Using Cloud Files w/ CDN for Clipish Library

Thu, 30 Dec 2010 22:19:40 +0000

Over the last two days we’ve moved our Clipish Library from serving the files locally on our web server to Rackspace’s Cloud Files service. It is similar to Amazon S3, however since we were already using Rackspace Cloud Servers, we thought it would be easier to just keep it all under the same roof. The actual changes in code for using Cloud Files only took about 2 hours, but I had to write a script to loop through our entire library and populate Cloud Files with our current library. What is great is in the future when we add items, our code will automatically add files to Cloud Files via their API. Here is our network graph after switching (Item #3):

Sharing Sessions Across Multiple Servers With Memcache

Wed, 15 Sep 2010 08:52:15 +0000

These last few days have been full of quickly implementing things I’ve only read about, but hadn’t done for myself.

One situation was looking at splitting web traffic across multiple servers. In our case, we had only 2% of our website that would spike and increase our load by %1000 percent (I’m not joking) for a short period of time. So instead of doing traditional load balancing, we opted for routing specific functions to a custom subdomain that would run on another server. That way if the thousands of crazy video game players (you know who you are), slam the servers trying to get a cool skin for their online avatar, it would only take down that one section.